A Taste of Heaven: Short Fictions

By R. Sebastian Bennett

In an atmospheric, panoramic journey stretching from Louisiana's Cajun territory and Florida's alligator-ridden swamps to the subway tunnels of 1980s Tokyo, the obstinate misfit characters in these fourteen brilliantly crafted pieces are simultaneously redeemed-and one-upped-by the inspirational weirdness of the even stranger world around them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tailwinds Press Enterprises LLC
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985312430

R. Sebastian Bennett

R. SEBASTIAN BENNETT was born in New York City and grew up in Southern California. He has degrees from Columbia University; the University of Southern California; and the University of Louisiana, where he was a Doctoral Regents Fellow. The founding editor of the Southern Anthology and the former director of the Creative Writing Program at Muskingum University, Mr. Bennett has also taught fiction writing at the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Louisiana. He was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and his writing has appeared in numerous publications worldwide, including Columbia Journal, Fiction International, the Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, the Texas Review, the Wisconsin Review, Paris Transcontinental-Sorbonne, Equus, the Bombay Review, and the Galway Review. Mr. Bennett's novel, The Final Yen, was published by Sunbury Press in 2021. His website is rsebastianbennett.com.

Book preview

MUSIC MINUS ONE

Don’t worry.

At the edge of the driveway is Glover, the happy pooch with a clotted tail and yellowed teeth. He is bounding and loping, and then he is next to you, pressing his head against your thigh. He will pant and drool while you stroke him for hours, never too long. From the back of his throat comes a low friendly whine, the kind of whine that sounds harmonic, cadenced—even almost human—and stops while you rub under his neck or behind his soft flopping ears.

Good Glover, you say, and pat the heaving chest and lumpy shoulder, allowing the dog to get hairs on you, a ribbon of golden fur down the inseam of your black jeans. Now Glover has wiggled between your legs, and he is pushing his nose into your crotch. Why do dogs always do that? It’s so embarrassing, especially when you’re at your boyfriend’s house on a date and he only laughs. But you don’t mind because you love Glover, with the bad breath and dislocated pelvic disks that make him drag his hind feet when he wakes up from a nap. Yes, you love your dog, even though you haven’t seen him for five months. Glover remembers. He remembers your perfume perhaps. Of course he understands that you thought about him and missed him while you were away at college without any pets at all—except for the cricket that lived in the corner of the dorm room and only chirped during the day (you had an agreement), and it never spit or dripped out any brown juice, ever. Crickets do that, they say.

Glover has a tick. A gumdrop-sized fat gray tick with an embedded head deep under the skin of the poor old dog’s front leg. You swallow and clench teeth as you pluck it—pop it—off the white glove of his foreleg, which is how he got his name. You have to wash your hands when you get inside, must remember. Now you just stroke Glover’s head, the tips of your finger in the fur of his crown, around the bony bump in the middle. Is that the cerebral ridge? You gaze deep into the dog’s round dull eyes. He has cataracts, poor thing. He looks back at you. Sometimes you can actually see trust; it comes as a gleam. Glover missed you. He loves you, and it’s okay that his hind legs leave eczema skin flakes on your shoes.

Hoh! Melinda’s back! The deep resonant voice of your father, Max, comes from one of the top windows of the huge Colorado timber house that seems very old because Max built it from used lumber that he got from demolition sites. You saw them once—abandoned schools and shipyards from the forties and fifties, cracked toilets and rusty pipes and mahogany flooring that looks even better than new when reinstalled, re-sanded, and stained so it glows. Max (it doesn’t seem so strange to call your father Max now that you’re a college girl) got it all so cheaply from that man with the infected nostrils, the edges red and scabby like he ought to be in a Victorian children’s book as a warning to little kids who pick their noses. Now Max is at the front door in the same old suspenders and Birkenstock sandals. He still has long pony-tailed hair to his elbows, which makes him look like a beast, a bridge troll, if he lets it down—so you told him his profile is striking and he ought to keep his hair pulled back in a clasp or a braid. It was daughter-to-father closeness, fashion advice, intimacy that he will always cherish, and you will too.

When you hug him hello, you give a real hug with arms all the way around his sloping shoulders. You’re glad he doesn’t have that awful pipey smell anymore since he stopped smoking, and you know he doesn’t mind that you’re not wearing a bra and it’s obvious in a T-shirt, but he never cared much for that uptight crap. Besides, braless is in style now. You cut the line at underarm hair, though. Max’s belly is round—not flabby—a big hard belly pushing against your abdomen. It’s true that he gained thirty pounds, you see as you lean against him and gaze at that face with the crooked nose and always-needs-a-shave roughness; the face that read you Little House in the Big Woods and Lord of the Flies—until Piggy got killed. That face didn’t crease, didn’t grimace when you put regular dishwashing liquid in the electric washer—two whole cups—and it foamed, spurted, surged out onto the maple hardwood kitchen floor before the sealer set, warping and ruining the tongue-and-groove nailing, so the workers had to come rip it up with big crowbars, mallets, and chisels. They stuck in adobe tile instead, which is rough and lumpy and beaded, but beautiful in its own way, right? Like an old mission floor . . .

Max has his arm around your shoulders, loosely, casually, like in that first picture of him and Mom—you always called her Mom, not Leonara. Maybe your shoulder feels like Mom’s to him, does it? Eight years ago—does he remember? The hoarse raspy wheezing . . . That final terrible time—heat piercing the forehead, searing, falling through the floor—when the nurse wouldn’t let you go into Mom’s room anymore. She wouldn’t let you open hospital door number 14. But you shoved and charged and turned the big round handle with the gold metal insert for the key; you twisted the cold metal knob and pushed hard to open the heavy door—Mom was gone! They’d taken her. But you could still smell the menthol rub she’d wipe on her chest, a big smear with two fingers into the blue jar and it came up like mucous, and Mom had to keep doing it, couldn’t stop. She stroked it, spread it over her breasts even though Max said that camphor was a suppressant from a homeopathic point of view, and probably caused asthma and allergies in children because the irritant or whatever couldn’t escape through the skin pores anymore. Exude is what he’d said.

With Max’s meaty arm still around your shoulder, both of you turn to gaze at the big mountain behind the house. It looks like an elephant profile, with a long thick trunk and two front legs composed of jagged rocks, pine, and sagebrush—where once you heard that whimpering, screeching, miauling from behind the rock and Max went up to see. It was a baby mountain lion. A kitten the size of a cat that didn’t even have claws or real big fangs yet. Just little paws with black skin pads and a wiggly stump of a tail. Its mother was gone. All gone. She probably got caught in a coyote trap or was shot with rock salt by some of the weirdos that lived in those shacks on the other side of the quarry. That’s what the ranger said when you took the lion cub to the station, and they put it in the cage next to the hoot owl with a broken twisted foot.

Glover is wagging his tail, pounding it against the truck now. Maybe that’s how he clumps it. He’s so excited that you’re home, he shivers and jumps and bangs his head on the bumper—he lets out a yelp.

Awww, poor Fat Baby, says Max.

Fat Baby? you ask, and take a step forward. The cheap polyester band around the top of your K-mart panties digs into the soft skin below your navel. Your jeans are too tight at the crotch because you probably put on about ten pounds at school. You can’t steam vegetables or make brown rice with tahini sauce there, the way you would at home. "Who’s Fat Baby?" you ask, and feel your chin thrust forward.

Max stops walking and turns his hairy chest with the gold chain that matches the bulbous carnelian ring with Persian etching that you only pretended to like. He still wears it on his pinky. "Oh—Glover . . . Fat Baby. That’s what we call him now, says Max. Just for fun. Kind of a cutie-pie name, you know? Doesn’t really mean much. Celeste thinks he looks like a chubby baby who doesn’t know he’s drooling." Max only holds your gaze for a moment.

The big front door creaks open. You hear it swing on those oiled brass hinges and you feel the dark of the hall behind your back. You turn to see a tall, plump woman with freckles, and bright red hair. She’s wearing a Guatemalan peasant skirt and a stained purple sweatshirt with the collar cut out. Hey, Celeste! Come and meet Melinda! Max grins and his cheeks puff up. You toss back your hair and shake Celeste’s pudgy hand. She takes too much vitamin E and eats too many nuts, you can tell already from her oily palm. She also probably eats too many carrots and oranges because her skin has a funny yellow glow, which a person really can see if they’re sensitive enough. Probably there’s a citrus scent, too. Does Max smell it in bed with her?

Hi, says Celeste in a nasal voice. She widens her eyes as if she’s talking to a toddler that needs encouragement. Of course, Celeste is probably nervous to meet you. So you give her that nice smile of yours and try to be open and loving as you smile, feeling your dimples, and you don’t really look her in the eye. Why can’t she wash the egg off her sweatshirt or comb her hair better? Your hair won’t ever be greasy and matted like that, and certainly not in five years when you’re exactly as old as Celeste is now.

I like your sweatshirt, you tell Celeste. It’s a pretty violet color. And Max grins wider, revealing uneven teeth. He looks like he might salivate over his bottom lip as he takes Celeste’s hand and squeezes it. Then he kisses it.

You go into the house, into that big front hall with the white plaster lion’s head nailed to a beam. They should really paint the head so it won’t be so garish, so glaring. The same old, deep musty smell is in the house. It’s a good homey wine-and-wheat aroma that greets you just like before. It surrounds you and enters your nostrils as you walk into that hall you knew so well, where your dates would step in and wait by the thigh-high clay satyr vase until you came out of your room near the top of the banister and walked down the wide stairwell like a princess, like Cinderella in her castle. Cinderella never needed to pad her brassiere, either.

At the end of the hall, bathed in the gray light from the window in the arch of the roof, the widow’s peak, is an odd statue. It’s about five tall, egg-shaped, with spheres of purples and blacks and reds in layered paint, thick with ridges like scars. Inside the circular casings are painted metallic rings, pearls, and baubles. Near the bottom, in one of the lower cells, lurks what seems to be a mouse head. Oh, you haven’t seen Celeste’s sculpture yet, have you? asks Max in a breathless grating voice, pausing to stare at the thing as if it is a gift from the heavens, a symbol of the universe, of eternity itself. Celeste is really—I mean really—an artistic genius.

Oh, stop . . . Celeste coos, sighs, and snuggles against Max. You can hear it, see it, know it, even though your back is turned. Their foot shuffling gives it away. Finally, you turn around.

"My professor says this piece is post-structurist, via deconstructurism, says Celeste. But art is just . . . She closes her eyes and leans back her head. I mean . . . all art, is just life."

You don’t look at Celeste. Yeah, it’s great, you say, above the rushing water from the toilet near the den, which never stops flushing, unless you remove the cover and reach deep inside through the tank water—clean water, Max said—and pull at the black rubber thing that leaves a skunky-smelling mark on your fingers for two days that won’t wash off.

Max never put up your art in the house.

Not even the pictures from art camp. He said he couldn’t drill or tape on the dry wall. Did he still have his birthday picture that you made him, Platypus in Lilacs, on the floor in his office?

The back of your neck burns, prickles. You pace down the corridor and take a long deep breath under the sand-blasted wood ceiling beams, calm beams, peaceful warm wood. You wander into the kitchen, which has an ammonia detergent smell even though the floor is very dusty, and dirty macaroni-infested pans and chipped mugs lie strewn on the counter like war refuse. You sniff the cleaning fluid again. At least Celeste cleans sometimes. Or did the detergent just spill? They haven’t taken out the trash, either. It’s flowing from green plastic sacks and—that spice rack! The tri-level, K-Tel Revolvo-Rack turntable that you bought Mom for Christmas when you were in sixth grade and only had enough money to shop at Gemco.

The Revolvo is shoved into the trash bag, feet up, top over like a sinking hulk. It’s coated with brown honey goo and clotted dead black ants.

Max thumps in and you hope he’s alone and he is. It’s good to have you back, he says, and gives you another hug, very close to his chest, but you pull away at the last minute—can’t help it—but cover yourself, automatically cloak the rebuff